Beware: plot holes ahead | Haruki Murakami’s latest novel

The City and Its Uncertain Walls ★★★
Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel)
Harvill Secker

From the pen of celebrated Japanese author Haruki Murakami comes The City and Its Uncertain Walls — a novel that promises so much but never quite seems to get there. This realisation was a disappointing one, because the hallmarks of magical realism gave me hope this would be an unusual read in the best of ways.

We meet our unnamed narrator as a teenager falling in love. But the girl who has captured his affections is by no means ordinary. When she disappears from his life without a word of warning, the narrator falls into a pit of despair. Never quite able to fill the void left by her departure, he clings to a story she told him: that the real her lives in a walled city, where she works in a library.

One day, he falls into a hole. “But this time,” the narrator says, “it wasn’t a metaphorical hole I fell into, but an actual hole dug in the ground.” When he comes to, it’s the gatekeeper of this walled city who finds him. He’s forced to discard his shadow to take up residence in this town, where he becomes the Dream Reader. We learn of the unicorns that roam the town during the day, its unforgiving winters, a town clock without hands, and its walls that seem to change shape to keep the residents confined. And, of course, there’s the girl.

One of the biggest problems I had with the book was its protagonist. He lives his life mundanely, halfheartedly, without much purpose, only to finally find this girl in the walled city. By the time he does, she’s still 16, and he is now 45. I know I can’t be the only one who finds this level of obsession unsettling.

In part two of the novel, the narrator has returned to his “real life” beyond the walled-in city. How this transpired is not immediately clear. But once back, something clicks. He feels drawn to apply to be the head librarian in a faraway mountainous town named Z*** and makes the move from Tokyo.

Here he’s introduced to the book’s more interesting characters. Mr Koyasu is a man who wears a skirt and a beret. There’s also M**, who almost always wears a Yellow Submarine parka, and the town’s new coffee shop owner, fleeing a past she’s hesitant to speak about. As we meet them and gather snippets of information about their lives, including how they came to be here, we do so through the narrator’s eyes. Each plays a role in ushering the protagonist into a new phase of his life, albeit rather slowly, leading us to an ending that’s not quite open and shut. 

Much is clarified when one considers the novel’s origins. As Murakami explains in the afterword, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a rewriting of a novella he published in 1980. Titled The City, and Its Uncertain Walls, he was entirely dissatisfied with the story and never allowed it to be printed in book form. Later, it would inspire his fourth novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. But 40 years since publishing the original long story, Murakami decided to pick it up again.

He felt relieved once he had made this decision. “For so long, this work had felt like a small fish bone caught in my throat,” he writes. Unfortunately, the result is an overwritten book filled with so much repetition that even the most patient reader will be driven to the verge of entirely giving up on finishing it.

As a first-time reader of Murakami, I wanted to love his 15th novel. There were bits I truly did enjoy: the effortless way he describes nature, both in the walled-in city and the town of Z***, and the superb manner in which he is able to capture the serenity of these places. And once it becomes clear Murakami is toying with metaphors, it’s a task to decipher exactly what point he’s trying to make. But his commentary about brokenness, abandonment and love — both found and lost — becomes poignant. 

“Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burnt out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed,” Mr Koyasu observes. “For the person involved, that sort of love is both the supreme happiness and a curse.”

When his prose shines, it does so brilliantly. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to save a book with too many flaws.